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Cake day: November 22nd, 2023

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  • People born before the 2010s, roughly. Doctors and lawyers were at one point considered two of the highest earning professions and it’s only been recently that college debt has really been considered a real issue rather than an excuse Millennials made up because they would rather complain about being poor than lift themselves up by their bootstraps.

    For the Baby Boomers, these professions allowed them to buy lots of assets that have since appreciated in value and become generational wealth, and they think the world still works that way.


  • It’s kind of a mix of things. “Political influencer” is just a new way of saying “propagandist.” Especially when it comes to the MAGA movement and fascist extremism rising all across the globe. These are the new KGB initiatives to destabilize Putin’s enemies across the globe (and all kinds of similar intelligence agencies, the US does the same thing I’m sure). It’s the “outside influence” that Twitter and Facebook were accused of during the last two election cycles in the US, which could have major consequences for Musk and Twitter, and this looks like Twitter trying to get off the hook for that by saying “we gave them the info they needed, we’re not at fault for them making the choice to be stupid and believe lies.”

    But the big thing is that it might shake the faith of the cult when they have to start justifying why they’ve been listening to the exact kinds of people they hate.



  • The Epstein files are such a big thing because releasing them was a major part of Trump’s campaign and calling their opponents and people they don’t like pedophiles is a big Republican tactic (it’s part of the “think of the children!” tactic they love to use). He made a huge stink about how all the politicians in Washington were in the files and that’s why they wouldn’t release them, and that when he became President, he’d release them and show the whole country how we’re being led by a bunch of pedophiles (with some implied “that’s why they support LGBTQ people” thrown in there).

    He created an entire cult who care only about the ring of Jewish pedophiles who secretly run the world or whatever, and they made it their entire personality. Their glorious leader actually being one of the people listed in there would crack a foundational pillar of their worldview. I’d say “if they even believe that it’s true and not a liberal lie”, but Republicans are doing a damn good job of openly stating that he is definitely in there and that’s why they won’t release them.





  • One thing about this is that it seems to labor under the assumption of a symmetrical (or near symmetrical) fight, and that is exactly the last thing that a resistance group should be doing.

    The most effective strategy for a resistance group is to be as expensive a problem to deal with and as difficult to get rid of as possible. Defend the community for sure, but the real fight is against the logistics of an armed force. The more time and money they have to waste, the better. Certain kinds of paint are impossible to get off of glass, like the glass used in bulletproof windshields that would need to be completely replaced, or the kinds of clear plastic used in things like riot shields and visors. At the extreme end, there’s options like paying these fascists thugs a “visit” in the dead of night. All these human traffickers have homes to go back to at night, and if enough face repercussions, it will quickly become difficult to find people willing to stick their neck out and possibly become yet another new fountain.

    All this to say, I don’t think anybody who actually knows what they’re doing or intends to do something thinks that they’re going to help form a standing army and fight the US government. Sporadic and random acts of self defense or defense of the community? Sure. Suicide by cop? I would be surprised if people weren’t thinking about that eventuality. But Rambo is not gonna happen and any violence will definitely happen alongside the peaceful protests that we’ve been seeing for months now, and not instead of them (at least, not until things get very very bad).



  • I never said otherwise. I said that the economy does better under Dems than Republicans. That doesn’t mean that it’s the way things should be done, just that under Dems jobs are added to the economy rather than lost and the national debt grows at a slower rate than under Republicans. Between the two, the economy objectively does better under Dems.

    I simply was saying that the “Biden bad because brown people and the economy broke because woke” narrative is a farce no matter how you look at it.


  • Your timescale is skewed. You’re either young, pushing a narrative, or both, so let me describe how things look historically from a sample size that actually matters. 2 presidents is not a big sample size.

    Starting in the 80s, the American economy began to decline and the national debt began to rise under Reagan and politicians like him - trickle down economics had begun. In the late 90s, a president balanced the budget and actually began reducing the national debt (by cutting funding to social security and other less than stellar actions). That would be Clinton. And then along came Bush Jr and the post 9/11 forever war in the Middle East. Ever since the start of the Iraq war, the national debt has risen like an ICBM. I remember when news channels talked with disbelief about Bush possibly doubling the national debt within a year.

    So it’s 2008, Bush just finished up his second term, and hundreds of thousands of people have lost everything in the 2008 depression (except for Bush’s rich friends. They got government bailouts and made bank buying up all the poor people’s houses). So, what now? Now, a black man who runs on a campaign of changing things for the better wins the election in a landslide, and tries to do most of what he promised. The economy sees large amounts of growth and jobs added, and the spiraling of the national debt slows down. However, Republicans vow to never let a black man do anything in the White House and the Democrats capitulate before the fight ever starts, so Obama is hamstrung and despite trying, ends up being forced by Republicans shutting down the government to not fulfill any of his campaign promises in his two terms (except for installing a healthcare system that Republicans fought tooth and nail against because it makes it illegal for health insurance companies to kick cancer patients off their health insurance and then refuse to cover them for having a preexisting condition: cancer).

    Now it’s 2016 and a man who ran on a campaign of undoing everything the black man before him did and the promise of kicking out all the politicians that he’s been friends with since his big business days in the 80s has been elected. And what does he do? He spends the first 2 years largely going line by line and undoing every single thing that the black man did while in office, and then spends the next 2 years mostly giving tax breaks and government money to the friends he said he would kick out and “drain the swamp” while the national debt once again rises like a tide in a swamp and the economy stagnates. Then 2019 hits and the economy collapses again under a worldwide pandemic, just a month after he got rid of the office the black man set up to prevent a pandemic.

    So now it’s 2020 and the country has just elected the old guy who was the black guy’s right hand man. He campaigned on not rocking the boat and keeping the course. Nothing exciting, but we’ll see what happens. True to form, 4 years of stabilization happen. The debt slows down, the economy sees jobs come back, and things are looking a little more calm.

    Then, in 2025 the old guy who was so upset about the black guy comes back and his swampy friends are right behind him. The debt begins to balloon and the economy starts to shudder under the weight of global tariffs and worldwide uncertainty of a possible trade war against friend and foe alike. And that’s just in the first 3 months of the year.

    Tl;dr: the economy consistently grows under democrat presidents and the national debt slows down. Under Republicans, the economy shrinks and the debt skyrockets. This stays fairly consistent the farther back you go, but Reagan is an important point in this because he started trickle down economics and showed the Republicans that big government can be good for them, too, so long as they hold the purse strings, and Bush is the other important point because he’s the tipping point for when the debt went from manageable to using a sink to try to put out a burning building.




  • On the one hand I agree, on the other I’m so angry and tired of either hearing that my issues aren’t important enough to do something about (the line told to Millennials during pretty much every election - presidential and otherwise - from Bush onward outside of Biden and Obama on things like housing prices and student loan debt/price of college) or that as a transgender person, we need to let the Republicans do a little genocide and removal of our rights and freedoms as a treat or else the “moderate Republicans” won’t vote for the Democratic candidate (are the “moderate Republicans” in the room with us right now?). And then we get blamed for the Dems losing one way or another regardless. Either the Millennials didn’t vote hard enough, or our demands of things like affordable housing and protection of minorities’ rights were “too radical and lost the Dems the moderate vote.”

    I still voted for Harris because it was either the Dems rein in the fascists to some extent at the federal level or the only safe places being Democrat run states, but the Dems absolutely threw us under the bus as a “worthy sacrifice” to court a mythological voting base that hasn’t existed in decades - if it ever did at all - and I can’t really blame people for being sick and tired of it.


  • Jim Jones, of the Jonestown Massacre. The cult leader who we got the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” from (though they actually were too poor to get Kool-Aid and they laced Flavor-Aid, the off brand version, with cyanide instead). When he started out, he was actually a very influential Civil Rights activist who is responsible for the policies that would later become the foundation of the civil rights laws in his home city. But he later became a crazy cult leader and by the time of the cult’s mass suicide, he ranted like Trump does today.

    As for how anybody could believe that Trump’s a good businessman, many people only know him as that guy from The Apprentice, not the businessman who has bankrupted multiple casinos, an airline company (and beauty pageant for young girls who he flew around the country with in his private plane - just him, the girls, and a man by the name of Epstein), and who couldn’t even sell steaks to Americans.


  • 2016 Trump ran on the idea of being the good businessman who was going to clean up the swamp and get this company’s country’s act together. Just like any other CEO selling to investors. I have friends who, halfway into his campaign, were like, “I kinda like this Trump guy, he tells it like it is,” and by the time of the election they had completely 180’d on him because of the details of what he was promising.

    One of these friends is super into cults and true crime, and he says that listening to Trump is eerie because he sounds exactly like Jim Jones. Then, and now. Back then he sounded like Jim Jones in his prime (and read Hitler’s speeches as bedtime stories according to an ex-wife, which would explain why all his campaign promises match up with Hitler’s). Today, he sounds like Jim Jones making his death speeches while you can hear them forcing the cultists to drink the Flavor-Aid and gasping, choking, and dying in the background of the recordings.

    The people who liked Trump the first time and didn’t change their minds then were never going to change their minds the second time. They’ve already bought into the cult. And that’s what Trump is - a cult leader. He promises them a solution to their misery by giving them an obvious target to take their aggression out on, and people eat it up because they want a simple solution that absolves them of any blame.



  • It’s difficult to say, but they’re definitely overrepresented both online and in the news. They’re definitely a minority, the Republican party knows this and it’s why they fight so hard to maintain control, but other context in the country makes it hard to say how much of a minority they are. Conservatives generally make up the areas of the country with the lowest population density, with cities running very much in the opposite direction. And a big part of Republican policy is convincing voters to vote against their own interests. I’ve seen stats that say that 60% of the population is more left-leaning than the government at any time. But we also have very low voter turnout here due to things like disenfranchisement and gerrymandering. Without that and things like the Electoral College, Republicans would never hold enough seats to hold any real power ever again. Trump actually got noticeably less votes in 2024 than he did in 2016 - it’s just that the Dems got way less votes and the Electoral College that allowed him to win.

    As for the political spectrum here, I’d argue that the spectrum in Germany (and the rest of Europe) is normal, while the spectrum here is so shifted to the right that it’s unhealthy. And it’s gotten way worse just in my lifetime. Trump’s party called the Republican party of the 90s communists for their policies. Back then, the two parties largely disagreed on the details of policy, though there has always been the bigoted side of the Republicans. It wasn’t until the country elected a black man to office that things really went off the deep end. The Democrats every year say that they have to court some mythical moderate Republican to vote for them or else they won’t win, so they shift to the right and disenfranchise the left. But that’s not how Republicans operate, especially anymore. They no longer care about policy but about hurting Democrats, so they’d never vote for them anyway.

    It’s also important to note that Bernie isn’t even really a Democrat, he just runs with them because they’re the closest to being a leftwing party. The Democrats don’t want him, he’s too leftist for them.


  • It’s always a very case by case kind of situation, but I’d say don’t expect them to change their opinions. Even the ones who aren’t in it because they were already bigots.

    Trump runs a cult, and after a certain point of commitment to a cult, it becomes basically impossible to get someone out because of the sunk cost fallacy of making it their entire personality and having to admit what they did in service to the cult was wrong.